


Hallelujah

by mizael



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Drabble Sequence, M/M, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-19 21:01:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8224675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mizael/pseuds/mizael
Summary: Viktor’s thumb on his lower lip, his fingers resting on Yuuri’s neck.





	

**Author's Note:**

> weeps  
> i know nothing about y!!oi besides what's in the first ep so most of this is speculation and shots in the dark HAHA,,  
> if some of this seems disjointed it's bc it's 5am and i'm so tired
> 
> inspired after listening to [hallelujah](http://yuugo.tumblr.com/post/151379896963/lovedbyapollo-hallelujah-by-kd-lang) on repeat

When he was younger, Yuuri would hop-skip stones along the pond on the way home from school. He didn’t have the hand for throwing them, the muscles in his arms still weak, but he’d stand there and watch them sink one after another. Then he’d wade into the pond with his school uniform still on and dig all the stones out. Yuuko had scolded him once, hands on her hips, her cheeks puffed out like a squirrel.

“Come on, Yuuri,” she’d say, waving her hands wildly down the road that led to their houses. “Don’t get sick from going in the water. And don’t go into the water with your uniform! You have to wear that tomorrow, and your mom’s gonna have to wash it.”

“Sorry,” he’d say in response, dropping all the rocks in his hands at the edge of the pond. “I didn’t want to leave them in there.”

“Well that’s all good, but roll up your pants next time or something,” Yuuko would huff, and then take his hand. Yuuri would flush all the way from his cheeks to the tip of his ears, just red, red, red all over. “Come on, let’s go drop our things off and then go to the rink.”

“Okay!”

A huff of quick air, a light in his eyes. Yuuko would laugh at his enthusiasm and Yuuri would laugh for her. They ran back to their homes afterward, throwing backpacks haphazardly onto their beds and meeting outside the ice rink. Nishigori would come sometimes, too, skating recklessly in his family’s rink, bumping purposefully into Yuuri and Yuuko during his twists and turns.

Yuuri always fell over whenever Nishigori collided with him, skidding over the ice like a flat, spinning rock. Yuuko would yell at Nishigori afterward, and Nishigori would laugh: loud, teasing, boisterous, so full of energy.

Then they’d sit, or stand, and Nishigori would bring out a small TV in the backroom, and they’d watch Viktor Nikiforov skate his way to the junior championship victory.

Yuuko would imitate him, all twists and turns and jumps, flinging her arms out in an arabesque so breathtaking Yuuri would stop to watch while in the middle of his own routine. Nishigori didn’t join them for those sessions. Yuuko would smile and laugh and he’d do it with her.

Once, in the winter, when the water in the pond froze over, Yuuri found the stones he used to throw still at the edge of the ice where he left them the spring past. Curiously, he put his backpack on a nearby bench, and grabbed a handful of them with his mittens.

And then, one by one, he’d throw them all across the ice.

They spun in circles, like paired figured skaters, the water-turned-ice clinging to the stone allowing them to slide at least for a little bit across the frozen pond until they skidded to an abrupt stop. One of them hit a bump and flew over the pond, into the nearby bushes. Yuuri didn’t know why but he trekked into the greenery and groped around until he found the stone and returned it with the rest.

He’d seen Viktor Nikiforov do it once: a flying sit spin at the age of fifteen for the junior championships. Sometimes the adults couldn’t even do it properly. Sometimes they tripped and fell in the rink, on the stage, and he’d watch them smile and sniff and blink back tears on TV as their scores came on screen.

But not Viktor Nikiforov. At age fifteen, he was already leaps and bounds above everyone else.

“Yuuri, you do it so well!” Yuuko would compliment him when they had another one of their sessions copying Viktor Nikiforov on TV.

“Really?” he felt his chest heave, but Yuuko smiled bright at him, and he breathed a bit easier. “I think I still have a ways to go, though.”

“Don’t be silly!” Yuuko laughed, skating circles around him. “You could enter a championship yourself, you know!”

“I-I wouldn’t be ready for that.”

“Then let’s keep practicing until you are!”

And he’d skate, alone, with her, with Nishigori, until the sun had long set and the moon was shining. Hasetsu wasn’t a very industrial town. They saw the Milky Way above them some days. Yuuri would walk home in his brown parka and stare at the sky, glittering with stars.

Sometimes he’d imagine them like the sequins on Viktor Nikiforov’s stage outfits. An arc of his arm, a jut of his chest—the sequins always shone on his outfit in the most beautiful of ways. Yuuri would release a breath and watch the steam travel upward.

_I want to be like Viktor Nikiforov someday,_ he’d think, and then focus on the road home.

 

 

Yuuri had crushes, and Yuuri _has_ crushes.

Yuuko smiled and he’d feel his heart beat in staccato like the beginning drums of the Radetzky March. He remembered doing one jump spin during the music, Yuuko alongside him, and then she’d take his hand and they would twist around each other like incompatible sides of a magnet until Nishigori joined them and took Yuuri’s spot. He watched them: spinning, skating, jumping.

Then he left for Detroit, and found in a letter that Yuuko and Nishigori had gotten married, and that Yuuko was with child already (and as he would later learn: she was with _children_ , not just one singular child). He didn’t feel the twist in his gut he was expecting to feel, the cold, hard jealousy that was supposed to gnaw at him for the exclusion of his presence among them. Deep down, he knew, they’d always love him.

He’d watch Viktor Nikiforov in his apartment, when his roommate had gone to sleep, and count beats to the songs he danced to. His feet would itch, his toes would curl, and Yuuri followed along all of Viktor Nikiforov’s movements with the bounce and tiny arcs of his arms while seated on the couch with a blanket. The Grand Prix collection, as the DVD was called, was gifted to him by his mother after a long and hard battle on various auctions to grab a hold of one that had been signed by Viktor Nikiforov himself.

Yuuri had traced over the curves and arcs of his signature with his fingers, his hands, his nails—even his mouth. A kiss for a faraway dream. Yuuri didn’t ever think he’d really make it to Viktor Nikiforov’s senior stage, but that wasn’t true. He did, and that was why he was in Detroit, thousands of miles from Hasetsu and home.

“Yuuriiii,” his roommate was at the doorway between the hall and the living room, eyes blinking, the tiredness in the slouch of his figure. “You can watch Viktor tomorrow.”

“I-I’m sorry,” Yuuri said, hastily grabbing the remote and hitting the power button. The room returned to darkness, no longer illuminated by the glow of the TV. “Did I wake you, Chu—Phichit?”

“Mm, not really,” Phichit yawned. “But go to sleep.”

“Okay.”

Yuuri gathered up his blankets and waited until Phichit trotted back to his room, before he took the DVD out of the player and returned it to its case, with Viktor Nikiforov’s face plastered on the cover.

Perhaps it was the early morning, Yuuri would think later, but he held the case tightly between his fingers and stared at the glossy cover in the darkness and then kissed it.

And then, feeling dirty, he’d tuck the case under his arm and hurry back into his room, staring not at the Viktor Nikiforov posters along the wall as he put the case back in the box where it belonged, and crawled into bed.

That night, he dreamt of throw jump spins, Viktor Nikiforov’s hands tossing him into the air, the ice below his feet, the blades on his skates, and the cheers of the audience as he landed in a perfect arabesque.

Yuuri woke up, and thought: _someday_.

And he’d pull on his shoes, grab his skates by their strings, and join his roommate in heading over to the rink just down the block where all his dreams lied.

 

 

_Someday_ was supposed to be _today,_ except Katsuki Yuuri of Japan placed last in the Grand Prix championship finals, and Viktor Nikiforov placed first. He had felt it, for a moment, his dream within reach, all of it just a hop-skip-jump away and Viktor Nikiforov, there, among it all.

And then he tripped, and failed, and watched himself on the screen across the rink, blinking back tears as his score showed up.

_Sixth place._

_Last place._

Viktor Nikiforov smiled at him afterward, but Yuuri did not want him to. Yuuri felt numb, like the world had all crashed around him, creating a large _bang bang_ sound as it broke into millions of tiny pieces that he would never be able to put back together.

_No._

He retreats into the bathroom and finds a stall to cry his heart out, all his dreams at his feet, gone. Five years, training, to skate and be on a stage with Viktor Nikiforov, and for what? For what had he gone to such great lengths, only to embarrass himself on international television?

Yuri Plisetsky is right: he should quit.

There isn’t enough room in the finals for two different Yuris.

 

 

Hasetsu is quiet; it’s home. Yuuri practices his jumps on a park bench and throws rocks across the pond even if they still don’t jump like they’re supposed to. Yuuko’s smiles are still like sunshine, her awe still real. Yuuri wants to hang up his skates, lock them in a safe where he won’t be able to see them anymore, but Yuuko beams and he wants to love them again, his skates.

In his childhood rink, there is no audience, no pressure. There is just him, the ice, his skates, and Yuuko looking on with her cheery expression, elated to see him after his five years abroad.

And he dances—

Viktor Nikiforov’s dance. He swings around the rink, twisting, turning, spinning. There are no knots in the places where he’d need confidence, no hesitation or worry of failing in a rink that he has skated on his entire life. Yuuko, in all her kindness and understanding, would understand if he tripped and failed like the finals.

But he doesn’t.

He glides like a bird in the air, a swan in his lake.

Here, at least, at home, he skates the way he is meant to, supposed to. Here, Viktor Nikiforov seems like eons away.

 

 

Viktor Nikiforov is not eons away.

Viktor Nikiforov is in his family’s hot springs, naked— _naked!—_ and smiling at Yuuri like Yuuri is a jackpot that Viktor Nikiforov had somehow won when Yuuri doesn’t feel like any jackpot at all. He had trashed his chance at the finals, the millions of pieces of his dreams left behind in Russia, in the ice of the skating rink where the tears had stung his cheeks.

Yuuko’s triplets had uploaded that video of him skating Viktor Nikiforov’s routine on the internet and it went viral. Yuuri wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

“Vi-Viktor? What are you doing here?” he almost feels like he’s in a dream, a dream where Viktor Nikiforov has his hands on Yuuri’s waist and is hauling him into the air. Then, he’ll do a triple spin jump and land on one foot, skating backward. Viktor Nikiforov would skate towards him, _with_ him, and then—

“Yuuri Katsuki!” Viktor Nikiforov’s Japanese is perfect despite his foreign status, just like everything else about him. “I will help you win the Grand Prix finals.”

What?

_What?_

“Wh-What?!”

Mozart’s Requiem plays in his head: three scratch spins, a grand lutz, followed with a camel spin and a three turn. If it were a short program, it would be three minutes. A free program would be four minutes. Yuuri cannot remember the last time he has skated to Mozart’s Requiem but all of a sudden it plays in his head.

His heart, it beats to the tempo, three-four, three-four. Too fast. Tone it down.

Viktor Nikiforov is standing in his family’s hot springs.

Two-four, two-four. No, that’s faster. Breathe.

Viktor Nikiforov said his name.

Four-four, four-four. Good. Normal. Slower. Inhale, exhale—

Viktor Nikiforov wades over, unashamed, the towel meant for his waist slung over his shoulder instead, and leans forward until he’s just inches, centimeters, away from Yuuri.

It is there, in front of him: his dream, reassembled.

“I will coach you, and help you win the Grand Prix,” he says again, closer, softer, his breath exhaling hot mist on Yuuri’s chin, his lips. “Yuuri Katsuki.”

Viktor’s thumb on his lower lip, his fingers resting on Yuuri’s neck.

His dream—it’s Viktor—but skating, and—

“P-Please. I mean.”

A beat.

“Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> (ó﹏ò｡) www  
> [find me on twitter](http://twitter.com/octomaidly)


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